Disclaimer:

These are my personal views and are meant for Informational purpose only. Please verify the Information via Professional help or via Official references before acting upon the information provided in this Blog.

Technology

I’ve been using Google Alerts for more than a year now and I thought I’ll talk about how it helps me keep track of who is talking about XYZ on the web. here XYZ could be a brand, your full name, your competitor’s name, your company name among other things.

So why should you care?

Well, whether you know it or not, someone out there is talking about your brand, about YOU or about your company. you can’t control that – but what you can do is to “Monitor” it. Keep an eye out on what people are talking about YOU or your brand on the internet. That way, you get to stay current w/ the conversations about things that matter to you.

And If you’re a blogger then you can set up an alert for when your blog gets found (a.k.a indexed) by Google – nice! right?

I have researched about Presentation Tips over past few weeks, one Tip that I read again and again is that “Make Fonts larger for readability”. To that end, I just changed the font size of the command line prompt so that when I am presenting, the audience is able to see what I am typing. So If you’ve have to present to audience something via command prompt, this should be of helps:

1. Open command prompt > Right click near the Title bar > select properties

2. switch to font tab > select the font and the size. you can also change the color, layout among other things here.

3. see how it looks:

Conclusion:

In this post, we saw how to change the Font size of the windows command prompt.

The success of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, not to mention Wall Street firms and industries from manufacturing to retail and healthcare, is increasingly driven by better tools for extracting meaning from very large quantities of data,” says Tim O’Reilly

In 2002: The Data Warehousing Institute estimates that data quality problems cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion a year. And of course, over the past 10 years, this number would be bigger. http://bit.ly/TPT9r3

Mantresh Jain is a C Level Executive at SMB in manufacturing domain based out of India. He has bachelor’s degree from a business school. And he holds a special interest in how businesses can leverage newest Information Technology Tools for optimizing business processes. He is working on a company-wide ERP implementation and is a single point of contact for the implementation process. He spends his free time on computer games of all kinds! Link with him here: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mantresh-jain/43/562/749

Some months ago, Mantresh approached me to see if I knew any tool that would help him deal with “messy” data. On Further questions, I learned that

– Messy data = lots of duplicates

– Uses SQL Server Express & do NOT have plans to upgrade to SQL Server versions that include Data Quality Services and/or Master Data Services. Remember the context here: They are a small and medium size business.

– Do use Excel – a lot!

– Do not have folks w/ “SQL” knowledge

With this requirements, I asked him to see if an add-in for excel called “Fuzzy Lookup” meets their need. After trying it out: here’s Mantresh’s experience of using Fuzzy Lookup add-in for Excel in their organization:

Summary:

In my company we are implementing ERP software. I faced a problem of Data migration from two fox Pro based software’s to SQL (for ERP)

More Details:

Two fox Pro Software’s worked independently form each other. And as a result each of them had their Separate Databases.

Lets Call them FX1 and FX2.

Now I wanted to import Account Master Data from them to SQL, Here are the fields in our Account Master data:

Name, Address, Bank Details, Phone Number among other fields

Problem

Both systems had issues of data Duplication and Data Inconsistency

To give you an example, I faced following problems:

1) FX1 had around 3500 entries and FX2 had 2400 entries

Now in FX1 out of 3500 around 2000 were same as FX2

Also FX2 had around 2000 entries same as FX1

Now i wanted to import only unique Account Master gathered by “combining” the two systems to SQL.

Example:

FX1 has “VMS Industires” while FX2 has “V.M.S Industries”

Solution

Fuzzy Look up add-in for Excel.

Step 1) Import data from both databases to excel

Step 2) Using Fuzzy Look up to find data matching to each other based on variable conditions that we select.

Step 3) It reorganizes data as

FX1 entry

1st matching FX2 Entry

2nd Matching FX2 entry

…

…

This is how we find Duplicate entries and then clean our data-set

Benefit

If not for Fuzzy Look I would have had to manually match each entry to each other which would have taken estimated 60 to 100 Man Hours but with Fuzzy Look-up, we did the job in 24 Man Hours Only.

In this blog-post, we would see how you can stop programs from automatically running when windows start. We’ll see how you do that using MSConfig. Before we begin, let’s discuss why would you want to stop few programs from automatically running when windows starts? Well, programs consume memory and thus lowers overall system performance. So by switching unwanted (or infrequently used) programs – you are increasing system performance. So ready? here are the steps:

1) Start > type “msconfig.exe” > open msconfig.exe

2) In MSConfig.exe > switch to “startup” tab

3) Disable the programs by unchecking the check-box.

Note: Before Disabling, please verify what a program is. You do not want to disable programs like Microsoft Security Essentials or third part firewall. That would be bad!

4) So I unchecked check boxes for Google Toolbar, Skype and Spotify on my netbook – and so these programs would not run automatically when my net-book starts.

5) When you’re done – Click OK > And You can choose to restart your computer – changes would be applied only after the restart.

That’s about it.

Note that here are other methods too like one’s listed here, research and use the method that suits you – But do NOT forget to switch off the unwanted programs from running automatically when windows starts.

A short Blog-Post explaining what each “term” means in Access. If you are interested, introduction” to Access is here (via Wikipedia).

Here are the details:

1. Tables:

The place where data is stored. Access is a “data store” which allows us to store data in Rows & Columns format. Here are couple of things that you should know about Tables:

1a. Tables can be related: If you come from the database world – you know that tables can also have relationships among them. If not, just think of relationships as a way to link similar data items. For example, Product Table having Product-ID column can be related to Product-Category table having Product-ID column. Benefit? The Product-Category column can have details about the particular category and since it is linked to the Product Table you do not have to enter the details about the category in the product table again & again. Saves time (and storage space) by eliminating redundancy.

1b. Columns in the Tables have Data-Types: You can specify the data-type of a column/field. So you can say that Column A will contain text data, Column B will contain Numeric Data.

1c. Each row added in a table is called a record

2. Forms:

Forms are used to “input” data into Tables. Think of forms as “cards” that allow you to enter data into tables one field at a time. Now, if you are new to Access, you know that you can enter data while creating/designing tables without creating forms – then why do you need forms? Let me give you an example: In an organization, Person A designs Access Tables and Person B who is not access-savvy uses it to enter data. Now, it makes sense to abstract/hide the “technology details” from the person who is not access-savvy and in that case, creating forms helps person B in entering data without worrying about the underlying table-structure.

3. Queries:

Queries gets it data from “Tables”. Why do you need queries?

3a. Queries help you “find” data from your tables. You can specify criteria like fetch data for month of January 2011.

3b. Combine data from more than one table

3c. Edit/change data. (adding a criteria is optional)

3d. You can delete data. (adding a criteria is optional)

4. Reports:

Once you have your queries/Tables that need to be “outputted” (or say printed) – you can create reports. Access has a nice Report Wizard that would walk you through steps that are needed to create a report.

That’s about it for this Post on a Database Management System! How do you use Access in your Organization or personally? Speak up in the Comments section!

Out of the blue, a question popped in my head: “why do I click on refresh button when I am staring at my Desktop?” – I didn’t know the “Technical” reason and since curiosity got better off me – I read this, this and this and I learned that: It does nothing! Neah, it does something – it redraws the icons on desktop. What does it mean? Have you ever changed the view of the desktop and messed up the icons? I remember I have and If you “refresh” your desktop at that moment – it would redraw the icons on the desktop. other than this, it does nothing!

I just learned that and so I thought I would share that with you!

anyhow, I also wanted to see the “negative impact on performance” of “keeping the F5 (refresh) on hold while on Desktop”. See what It did to my machine:

Before: 10-25% CPU Usage

With other things constant (Ceteris Paribus), I kept the F5 key (refresh) on Desktop on hold. Result? 50-65% CPU Usage.

Conclusion:

So unless I want to redraw the icons on my desktop, I would not bother refreshing my Desktop ever again..